I thought I would mark the occasion of having been spinning poi for 3 years with some fire, glow, and a flow practice I did on the beach in St. Thomas. :)

3years.m4v

In a strange bit of zeitgeist, I ran cross the same idea from two different poi spinners who I'm relatively sure had never spoken of the idea between each other this past weekend while I was in San Francisco. When dealing with 4-sided polygons in spinning, as one tends to with antispin flowers, elliptical CAPs, and any 9-square theory items, you wind up with two similar but difficult to transition between patterns: box and diamond mode. If we expand these out to octagonal figures, however, the issues switching between modes diminishes significantly in complexity.

techblog84.mp4

A couple months ago I posted a video using plane-bends to switch between inspin and antispin flowers. G saw the vid and suggested I try the same technique in split-time same direction, so here it is! My right side isn't as clean as my left side, but I still think it's a cool effect. Enjoy!

techblog82.mp4

For a large portion of the past year, I've had a massive poi mad-on for technique like Ronan McLoughlin's. He's from Cork, Ireland and has one of the most original poi spinning styles I've ever seen. Unlike most poi spinners (myself included), Ronan centers his style around stopping the momentum of the poi rather than keeping it moving, resulting in a dizzying array of stalls, pendulums, and contact work that always leaves me scratching my head.